I have just discovered that Ancestry considers it “fair use”
to use some records, such as census pages, in blogs. I thought I would share
today a discovery I made a while back when I was researching the Harts, i.e.
the Melvin J. Hart family, the family of my great grandparents and my grandfather, George Hart. I was examining the index of 1916 Canada Census of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and
Alberta, and could find Melvin and his
family, but could not find the Joseph H. Marlow family, i.e. that of my other
set of paternal great grandparents. When I went to the actual image of the
census page with the Harts, I noticed familiar first names of the Marlows
above, such as “Zella” and “Annabel”, and looking more closely, I could see
that they were the Marlows. At that point, I had not yet realized that the
Marlows and the Harts were neighbours. I was curious to find out why I could
not find the Marlows on the index, and soon discovered that they had been
mistranscribed as having the surname “Cardow”. This was so far from the correct
surname that it would have been very difficult for anyone to find the family on
a search. I submitted a correction to Ancestry, and received an email from them
thanking me for this.
Here is a section of the 1916 Canada Census of Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, and Alberta showing the Marlow and the Hart families living
next to each other near Lougheed, Alberta, Canada:
 |
| Courtesy of Ancestry.ca |
(You can click on the image to view it larger). It is easy to see from the handwriting
how the surname Marlow could have been mistaken, as the “m” does resemble a “c”, and the “l” like a “d”. You can see that four of the Marlow
daughters are missing from the family. Lena Sarah, my grandmother, would have
still been in Illinois with her husband George Smith and their family. They
were not to come to Canada to stay until 1919. Maud and Dollie were both
married with children and living in the area, and Winnifred had died two years
earlier in 1914 of typhoid at the age of twenty-two, which is coincidentally the same age
at which Dollie was to die in 1919, but from influenza. I am wondering if the Dollie’s
death played into Lena Sarah and George’s decision to come to Canada.
It is interesting to note that
Melvin Hart and his two sons, George and Alva, became naturalized Canadian
citizens in 1908, only three years after coming to Canada from Iowa. This would
have also been the same year that their homestead claim was “proven”. It appears
that none of them had any intention of moving back to the States. Susan Hart,
nee Monk, was born in Ontario so did not need to change citizenship. Their daughter Flora Jane Hart Jeffers was living in Edmonton in 1916 with her husband Roeberry Jeffers and their son Albert. Their other daughter, Lottie Hart Kells, had just married Robert Kells in March, and was living in the Lougheed area with her husband and her sister's son, Charles. I did not
include the section about literacy in the image above, but it is also
interesting to note that all of the adults were able to read and write except
for Melvin Hart’s son Alva, who could neither read nor write. He was to die by
a lightning strike in 1922. The farms of the Marlows and the Harts would have
been quite different as the Harts were homesteaders, having cleared their own
land and built their own homes and barns. The Marlows had purchased a
ready-made C.P.R. farm with pre-planted crops. This does not mean that life
would have been easy for them, as the C.P.R. houses were notoriously small and
inadequate for the weather, and many of the pre-planted crops failed, including
the Marlows’ potato crop the first year.
That the Harts and the Marlows were
neighbours is significant in my own family history as my grandmother, Lena
Sarah Marlow Smith, purchased the Marlow farm after the deaths of her father
and husband, which made her the neighbour of my grandfather, George Leslie Hart.
This would have brought them closer together, which led to their marriage in
1930, and the subsequent birth of my father.
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